Not worth getting. In short, this game is extremely boring and somehow made the ocean feel absolutely lifeless.

Endless Ocean 2 was one of my biggest childhood games growing up so I was looking forward to a new game in the series finally, but this game takes everything 2 did right and chucks it in the trash. The main thing to do in this game is explore and that’s just about the only thing to do, but exploration in this game is painfully boring with the randomly generated maps. The Veiled Sea is interesting for maybe about 30 minutes and then it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of what you get to see is the same flat seafloor over and over again with nothing new. I’m pretty sure each map has 1 designated “special” region, so you might get a map with a big iceberg you can enter, or a deep sea region, or a freshwater region. These are the most interesting places to explore but once you’ve explored them once, any magic they had quickly vanish once you roll them again. There’s nothing new to do in any of these regions. You’re either aimlessly scanning fish to meet scan quotas or aimlessly swimming to try and find 7 random arbitrary fish to spawn a UML or find something for the mystery board.

The story mode is one of the worst parts of the game. Each chapter is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of gameplay and you’re completely locked out of leaving the extremely limited story space you’re stuck in. Often times there isn’t even any marine life in these story segments despite all the coral around. It’s kind of jarring. And the story itself is laughable. The story mode as a whole is so shallow it could be entirely removed from the game and pretty much nothing would be lost.

And if you do want to actually complete the story mode, and you know, complete the game, it’s locked behind the ludicrous requirement of clearing the mystery board. 99 things you have to search for in randomly generated maps that aren’t even guaranteed to have what you might need. You can spend 2 hours searching 1 map and just find repeats for things you’ve already found. You can spend up to an hour trying to find random fish to spawn a UML only for it to be a repeat that you’ve already found. You can swim for up to 20 hours or more and never find the big circle that wants you to take a sawtooth shark to it. The game doesn’t even tell you what you have left to find to clear the board. The only thing to do in this game is swim and hope.

You’d think that at least discovering all the different species of fish would be interesting but this game butchers this as well. The game tries to throw pacific, atlantic, antarctic, deep sea, freshwater and prehistoric fish all in 1 big body of water and it makes no sense. It’s not immersive when you’re finding chinook salmon swimming alongside giant squid in a coral reef.

Rare creatures are especially dumbed down, you’ll find something like Thanatos and it’ll be a special moment - only to realize that there’s about 10 more of Thanatos on the same map. And repeat for every single legendary creature taken from Endless Ocean 2. Cocoa Maharaja, Gugnir, Apollo, Phantom, they’re all very common. One time I spawned into a new map for the first time and right next to me was a Singing Dragon. UML’s take the place of legendary creatures but they all have the same extremely disconnected requirement to spawn and before you can even make your way over to it you get a cutscene from across the map showing it in full detail.

You might think, that can’t be it, right? There has to be more. But besides playing the same gameplay loop in multiplayer, yes, that is literally it. Once again, you just swim, scan, and hope you find stuff in randomly generated maps.

Overall an extremely disappointing game and a waste of time to try and complete in full.